


Whatever Keeps You Sleeping

by signalbeam



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Intermission fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 10:39:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/608926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How the Rose got the scalemate pile from Terezi, and what followed immediately after her acquisition of the fuzzy dragon hoard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whatever Keeps You Sleeping

**Author's Note:**

  * For [naive_wanderer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/naive_wanderer/gifts).



> Just to be safe, this fic contains non-graphic references to violence and torture.

On the two month anniversary of Rose’s arrival on the meteor, she woke up to find that Kanaya had covered her in a rug. Kanaya herself was long gone. Rose had tangled the blankets around her shins and feet in her sleep, and the exposure to the chilly air had given her a headache—that, or the spray of chemicals they used to rid the room of the blood. For a while Rose had considered leaving the splatters as a decorative element, but all it did was make Kanaya hungry. If she had left the yellow and the magenta and the blue and the green where they were, maybe Kanaya would stay in the lab to lick the blood off the walls and floor instead of going out all the time. Pointless speculation. She set it aside easily enough. 

There was an apologetic note folded in half and taped to Rose’s laptop. Rose skimmed it, making sure to hold it at the very edges by her fingertips. In true trollish tradition, it had been written in blood, though whether it was Kanaya’s or some stockpiled ink jars hidden away in her sylladex, Rose didn’t know, and didn’t want to ask too straightforwardly about. This was the case for many things: for example, the food. Mostly the food. And, of course, smaller things she had considered asking about, like: _Kanaya, why are you glowing? Did you die? That’s great—I died, too!_ But she didn’t want to be tactless—it was a sensitive matter—and if she were to actually ask about the food, she’d probably be sick. 

With Kanaya gone, Rose was restless and in need of some company before she set to work. So she went to find Terezi. Terezi, of all of the trolls currently not in hiding, was the hardest to find, and therefore the most desirable. Karkat came to them voluntarily, could be heard at any time or day, and Gamzee—she worried about Gamzee, and tried to not think about why Gamzee would need to hide to begin with. He had seemed friendly enough. But Terezi, who once declared an intention to stay pissed at Rose forever, had withdrawn into Can Town. Gave herself over, perhaps, to a life of solemn civil service. 

It was easiest to go to Can Town by transportalizer, and today she emerged on the other side tangled in a web of yellow caution tape. Their last dream bubble had dropped them into a zombie wasteland. Rose remembered the light in the Mayor’s eyes when he saw dictatorship, and groaned inwardly. She craned her head over her shoulder, and saw the Mayor holding a fork at her. 

“I didn’t know I needed a permit to enter,” she said. 

He shrugged, and waved the fork about. 

“Wouldn’t you say there’s something inherently undemocratic about this?” she said. “No, I’m well aware that this is a crisis situation. … No, you can’t throw me off the asteroid for provoking a town official. It doesn’t count as provocation if I simply question your—ow!” 

He looked guilty for stabbing her, at least, and after unraveling her from the web, let her through to Can Town proper.

Can Town itself had been built from an unused storage room, perhaps the size of the computer lab, perhaps larger. Either way, the boundaries of the town were established firmly by the few lights in the room, overlapping circles that left forbidding and dark corners. Dave and Terezi’s living quarters were located in a long spot of light divided from the town proper by a flickering light bulb. Dave himself was nowhere in sight, but Terezi sat in the middle of a circle of items, sniffing cards in her sylladex. Every now and then she’d captchalogue a card and toss it straight behind her. The majority of the things at her feet were the usual assortment of kit and kibble: things that had probably looked useful early in the game, but turned out to be totally useless; writing implements—and dragons. Or rather, small, stuffed ones. There was one right at her toes, and Rose picked it up as she approached. It was a shade of blue Rose had seen trapped between floor tiles, with staring, green eyes, and someone had stabbed it in the middle and yanked out its cotton entrails. Each of the dragons surrounding Terezi exhibited some kind of deliberate injury: one headless, one eyeless, one with toeless feet and a cut throat. 

“These are cute,” Rose said, overcoming the uncomfortable sight of the tortured toys for the sake of a rare conversation. Terezi turned to Rose and smiled, though with her lips closed over her teeth. Rose squeezed the blue one, and more cotton fell out of its hole. “Where did you get them?” 

“I bought them,” she said. She picked up a bright red dragon with white eyes and no legs and said, “You think they’re cute?” 

“Yes,” Rose said firmly. She was still unsure of how to approach Terezi, whether to plunge headfirst into jocularity and humor or to match Terezi’s newly subdued sobriety. Their first conversation had been exhilarating, a shotgun blast of exposition, mockery, and doom. The promise of second contact, remembered only on Rose's revival, excited her. She saw avenues and possibilities in Terezi, the potential for a clear friendship—but in person, Terezi seemed to be a gently deflated version of herself. Smaller than she ought to be, even though her shoulders strained against her—uniform? Costume? Kanaya had called it a costume, but Terezi wore it with ginger disgrace that dignified the too-short tights. Of all the people on this rock, excluding WV, Terezi and Karkat were the only ones at or about Rose’s height; even so, it was startling to come to Terezi and not have to tilt her chin up just to remain level. “It’s why you bought them, isn’t it?” 

“Interrogation practice, actually.” 

“Real trolls were hard to come by?” 

“No.” 

Rose scooped up another dragon. It squeaked when she pressed its stomach, like it was startled. She saw Terezi’s ear twitch toward the scalemate, then smooth back flat against her head. “I bet Kanaya could fix them up,” she said. “If you’d like to resume your interrogations.” 

“I’m done with those,” she said, shrugging. She stuck her finger into the fuzzy hole, and pulled out bits of cotton. “Maybe the law isn’t for me. Maybe I’m looking for a career change.” 

Thirteen seemed a little early to be making definitive projections on the rest of one’s life, but one could just as easily argue that post-apocalypse, it was Rose who was strange for not revamping her life given their changed circumstances, i.e. the destruction of civilization as they knew it. Rose tried to figure it out, and then wound up going with the least subtle weapon in her arsenal: “Why?” 

“Bluh,” she said, shifting away from bravado and into a strange, itchy silence. It was a pinkish one to Rose, like fresh skin straining over a still-healing wound. “Rose,” she said, declarative, and then: “Haven’t you ever outgrown something?” 

“No,” she said, which was only a lie if you were going to be excessively pedantic. Terezi gave her a flat look. Rose said, a little guilty, “Once I thought I hated my mother. Remember you once said that my mother hated me so much that she left me?” Terezi’s irises, red burnt on red, drifted to the left, and then down. The angle of her head adjusted accordingly. “I’m not mad! That was a long time ago.” 

“Okay. That’s good. Those were different times. I was so much younger then! Not a single scammed nakodile to my name.” She gathered the plush dragons into her arms, the corners of her mouth digging down into her skin in an obscure dissatisfaction. 

“What did you outgrow?” Rose said, helping Terezi with the dragons. She mashed two of the dragons together, and idly wondered if it would be considered lazy if she were to name one Calmasis and the other Zazzy. She wondered idly because she was turning Terezi’s apparent willingness to divulge over in her head, one part ready to excavate, the other crying, _hold, hold!_ , like a tawdry penny dreadful. She liked those penny dreadfuls. But then again, she also liked wizards. 

“Lawyering. Do you want them?” 

“Sure,” Rose said, although she couldn’t fathom what she’d do with them. Put on a play, maybe? _Hamlet_ , done by scalemates. She’d get Dave to do the voices. “Are you sure you aren’t going to want them back?” 

“Nah.”

Rose captchalogued the whole pile of them. Terezi tossed a pirate’s hat out of her sylladex and into the darkness, past the light. It seemed deliberate and temperamental. Rose could only surmise that in the ninja versus pirates debate, Terezi came down on the side of law enforcement. 

“Do you want to do something?” Rose said. “I noticed Dave is out.” 

“He’s collecting freaky specimens and putting them in jars. Is Kanaya going to be there?” 

“No. What’s wrong with Kanaya?” 

“The way she looks at me gives me the heevy-jeevies.” 

“I think most the time she doesn’t look at you at all.” 

“She’ll tell you all about it if you ask, I’m sure! If you ask.” 

“I’m asking you.” 

“Kanaya’s been denying you access?” Terezi says, head snapping up. She was, Rose knew, excited primarily by the prospect of making Rose uncomfortable than any genuine delight in a strain in her relationships. “She always liked playing the oracle. ‘Kanaya, how did you even know my sizes?’ ‘They were self-evident.’ Did she go because you pissed her off?” 

“No. Although I’m curious that you think that such a thing might have happened. What’s going on between you and Dave?” 

“I know your therapy tricks. I’ve been studying a few myself.”

“That’s great!” Rose said. “We can share.” 

Terezi, for a moment, looked heartbroken by her inability to bluff. Like she expected better of herself, as though, like a conman or a spy, bullshitting was not only a virtue, but a trade. But at the heart of it she was a creature of truth, though not honesty—or maybe they were the same? Rose was a little jealous of Dave, for how close he was to Terezi, or maybe only jealous that no one had stopped to strip her mind’s shelves bare besides a man who typed in white and black tentacled friends who didn’t even speak her language, anyway. There had to be something cathartic in having a friend do it; but Kanaya, lovely and reserved, would never intrude. 

When she arrived on the meteor, the trolls had been novel and prone to an automatic but limp defensiveness, like a cage of over-hassled hedgehogs. They were both everything Rose had hoped for and disappointingly mundane: evasive and suspicious, or loud and desperate, bloodsuckers who ate grubflakes in front of their laptops and fell asleep with their mouths open, white fangs and nearly-black tongue drying in the open air, lips parted like a split fruit—or they were trolls prone to wearing garish clothing, forgetful of the bond of hate-friendship she had once declared to be forged.

“It was just a manual on how to brainwash and kill rebels,” Terezi admitted. “Nothing you’d be interested in.”

“I am, though,” Rose said, and Terezi’s eyes went round behind her glasses—not knowing, perhaps, that Rose, who had denied herself the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of friendship, finally found herself before willing prey.

***

Terezi had the manual on-hand, or rather, on-floor. They searched the scattered mounds of unwanted objects together. Dersite newspapers, a black bishop costume. Some kind of strange hang glider, with a tail that waved back and forth when Rose tugged at a string dangling near the iron bar that was supposed to bear her weight. 

“Nepeta wanted me to be able to fly,” she said when Rose hefted it up, or tried to. 

“You could still keep it,” Rose said. “Maybe you could use it in a dream bubble.”

“Rose, don’t be stupid,” Terezi said, with warm affection. “The physics just don’t work. Maybe I could throw myself out of a tree and fall, but that isn’t flight. Didn’t your lusus ever feed you a infogrub on improvisional flight escape devices?” 

And on it went. It felt like there were hundreds of items strewn around them, but was probably less than that, not even a fifty. But every item was new to her, some pieces filling out half-told tales from Kanaya, others giving weight to Karkat’s endless shouting match with the void; others suggestive of the girl who once occupied Terezi’s uneasy, guilty frame. She was pleased, in a way, to see that Terezi hadn’t tossed the red and teal costume aside yet. She felt a strange affection for it; but also because she could sense that it had significance that shouldn’t be discarded. Maybe, like Batman, she could enshrine the old costume, in memory of old triumphs. And old shames. 

“Here it is,” Terezi said. The manual was in fact a small cube that she plugged into her husktop. She tilted the screen to Rose. 

“I can’t read it,” she said.

“Oh, right. Human.” She said it as though she had at some point thought otherwise. She turned the screen back to herself, and then ran her tongue across it. By all rights Rose should have been disgusted, but over the last few weeks she had come to accept the need to be enthused by the gross and grotesque. She was a proud prononent of multiculturalism, after all. “Kanaya hasn’t bothered to teach you?” 

“There hasn’t been the time.” Or rather, they spent most of their non-researching time speaking to one another, rather than flinging colored, bolded Courier text into each others’ IM windows. “Also,” Rose said, “I find it much easier to intuit what it means.” She tapped the corner of her eye. When Terezi looked no closer to understanding, she said, “Seer powers?”

“Oh. No, mine don’t work that way at all.” 

“How do they, then?” 

Terezi gazed at Rose. It was easier to think of Terezi perceiving her with eyes instead of nostrils, although if she tried, Rose could almost imagine it: swirling currents of orange and yellow curling around in Terezi’s sinuses and winding up to her brain like thoughts, or an infection. “I guess,” she said, “you can think of it as being able to extrapolate certain outcomes based on a set of given conditions. Every outcome and decision vortices if you continue to pursue that outcome, until you reach the end. If that makes sense.” 

“It makes perfect sense,” Rose said. “It sounds useful.” 

“Only if you know everything. It can’t account for wrong information, or freak accidents. You can build contingencies, but you can’t see everything.” She rubbed her hands together, not looking anguished, but instead threadbare. All the trolls, in their private and unguarded moments, Rose thought, probably looked like that. Trapped in a self-stasis, and exhausted by it. “Let’s test out your reading powers. Have a look!” 

Rose peered over Terezi’s shoulder. “‘Turn the objectivity upside down,’” she read. “‘And encircle the cranberry with the banana.’”

“Hahaha!” 

“Most of my reading has been technical,” Rose said defensively. “What? What is ‘banana’ slang for?” 

“Oh, Rose. I could tell you, but it’ll be funnier if you keep reading.” 

“‘Following this, avast ye literate roamer, whose eyes like decimated planets besought upon these letters. The banana must be secured to the cranberry and hooked up to a fake rebuttal milker. Through which stimulus will be upbraided. Prepare the surprise gizmo to banana. As you inquire, ‘To which colony were you meant to assault,’ apply surprise to the suture.’” Terezi laughed in the way that Rose had always imagined she would, every ‘ha!’ articulated and mocking, as though she was privy to a second story that ran beneath this one that made what Rose was doing seem pretty stupid—of course, she was the one who had just said ‘apply surprise to the suture,’ so points had to be given: this had indeed tumbled into the realm of satire. “What does it really say?” 

“It’s a basic shock interrogation procedure,” she said. “Interesting, isn’t it! I never got a chance to try this one.”

“On your scalemates?” 

“No, on people. Most of them deserved it.” 

“Well, that’s a relief,” Rose said, meaning it genuinely. But it made Terezi flinch and turn away. “What kind of people didn’t deserve it?” 

“That’s the problem, you see! Vriska tampered with the records, and now everything’s tainted. The pristine record itself is the evidence against her.” She flexed her fingers, cupping around an invisible thin stem—her cane, on the ground, or someone’s neck. “Of course, I’m not sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t be sorry. And I was justified—she wouldn’t still be dead if I weren’t. … You don’t even know who Vriska is, do you.” 

“I’ve heard of her,” Rose said. Good things, mostly from John. Dave, either reticent or considerate of Terezi’s privacy, had never mentioned her. “Why don’t you tell me who she is?” 

Her hand flexed again. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what she was. She was my sister, I think.”

“I didn’t know trolls had sisters.”

“We don’t. We never were sisters! I hated her, anyway.” 

“So she was your—” What was it. “Kismetest?” 

“Pervert!” 

“Plenty of people date when they’re young,” Rose said. “Also, I know you and Dave are dating. The last time I saw him, someone had bitten his arm.” 

“I can neither confirm nor deny that statement.” 

“So you see what I mean when I say that it wouldn’t be unusual if you and Vriska had latent feelings for one another. Subterranean feeling cysts, popped before they could break out. Not unlike acne, in a way. Subdermal feeling pimples.” That was a good one. She made sure to file it away to use on Karkat later. Terezi’s gaze, red and sharp, flickered between defensiveness and brazen indifference. “Maybe I can help you clarify. Free the pus from the wound, so to speak.” 

“Yuck.” 

But she didn’t refuse. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? Rose felt her heart thumping away in her chest, the beat irregular and fast. “Tell me about your sister,” Rose said. “Were you… littermates, maybe? Neighbors? John told me about Vriska a few times before, and he always seemed fond of her, although I have reason to believe his account of her is unreliable. I know that she has some special significance to you, and—” 

“Rose!” Terezi said, hard and cutting. She threw her hands up in the air. A finger caught the edge of the glasses and set them askew. She pressed the heel of her palm against the bridge of metal across the nose and said, “This why I’m sucking the barely-digested food from Dave’s gizzard and not yours! Do you know how hard it is to upchuck digested history if there’s some nosy person poking at you the whole time? Don’t answer that! I know you’re a light player.” Terezi licked her lips, a dark gray tongue that made her thin black lips become glossy. A line of white light ran across the seam and the outline of her mouth. After a time, she said, “I thought killing her was going to make me a big shot. I thought it’d mean something, like I’d finally graduated into the courtblocks of my virtually extinct species. I knew ahead of time that I might regret it, but…” And she seemed to flush, her gray skin darkening by degrees. 

“But you didn’t know how much you’d regret it,” Rose suggested. “Actually taking responsibility for something like that made you feel guilty.” 

“I always knew I was responsible for her,” Terezi said, offended by the idea of Rose not knowing how seriously she took her rules. “It was never about responsibility. Maybe the problem was that I thought she was mine to take care of, when she was never going to be. I thought it was just business in the end, but it was always personal, I just didn’t know it—but at the same time, it was never about her or any of the people she killed.” 

“So what was it about?” Rose said. “The rivalry? Your friendship?” 

“I don’t know,” she said. She stared out to the darkness over Rose’s shoulder, smelling only the depthless, black expanse beyond the circle of light they were presently standing in. The glasses, set on her face at a strange angle, made her face look weirdly flat and bewildered, as though she had woken up and found herself alone surrounded by vast expanses of sand. “Maybe we outgrew each other in the end.”

“That’s interesting,” Rose said. The beginning flushes of mortification were fast upon her—she didn’t know what to say beyond this, and already she felt as though she had pushed too far. Jaspers had never complained about the quality of her care, but Jaspers was also a cat, mostly quiet save for that one secret he had given her, and that secret hadn’t even made that much sense in context—Rose tried to find something better than what she had said, but Terezi was quicker. 

“Yeah, ‘interesting!’” she said. “Well, that’s what happens in the end, isn’t it! I already knew that our story was over, but Vriska just couldn’t let it die—if she just let it rest for another five sweeps, I might have even forgiven her, since everyone else has by now… Let’s drop it. This isn’t fun anymore.”

***

What _did_ one do with a sylladex full of scalemates? If you were Rose Lalonde: roll the carpet pile out to somewhere more discreet, hang up some tapestries, and make a scalemate pile. They were a soft, if squeaky, bedding. If she thought about it, she could imagine Terezi outbidding everyone on troll eBay and then rolling around her bounty, hugging them to her chest. Cute. Of course, she could have just as easily been a sneaky assassin, murdering people in their sleep and plucking their toys from their limp arms. Rose bounced in the pile, and thought: talk about convoluted. 

But there was of course the uncute reality: scalemates left open mid-surgery, and the guilt she felt whenever she severed a tiny dragon limb in mid-toss. Eventually she rolled out of the bed and went through Kanaya’s sewing materials: needle, thread of various colors, and a few dark and white buttons, and began the task of reassembling one of the more intact ones. Her stitches were uneven and the thread didn’t match the color of the fabric perfectly, but when she finished it, the dragon was back from the dead, albeit with a mismatched eye. 

“I dub thee Polonius the Ruddy,” Rose said, holding him up to the light. She expected in that moment for Kanaya to return, but there was no flash of the transportalizer and the door remained shut. She sighed and rubbed Polonius’ tapering snout. Then she went back to collect some more scalemates. She’d continue, she decided, with Eustace the Green. 

She woke up to a bright light searing through her eyelids, the spines of a fan and sloping down—it was Kanaya’s hand on her shoulder. The chainsaw hung from her free hand, mercifully free of blood. Fresh blood, at least. Kanaya had left the purple splattered along the teeth and body of the chainsaw as a kind of morbid trophy. Kanaya sat next to Rose, neck stretched towards Rose like a crane. A few months ago, it would’ve been appropriate to call her ‘rangy’ and leave it at that, but in recent weeks she had made the leap into ‘gawky and gangly,’ and her face had settled into an expression of bug-eyed intensity. 

“You’re back early,” Rose said. 

“I ran into Karkat,” Kanaya said. She licked her lips, then fit her tongue between tooth and lip. It moved, slowly, around her mouth. The strain and bulging of her cheek made the shadows flicker on the wall. “What are you doing with Terezi’s scalemates?” 

“She gave them to me.” 

“Did you kill her for them?” 

“No! And considering her issues with murder, I don’t find that very funny.” 

“‘Issues with murder,’” Kanaya said, making air quotes with flicks of irritated light. “Most people have murder issues, though it is more commonly called a ‘conscience.’” Rose tried to make herself busy with the needle, but only succeeded in poking her thumb. “I’m sorry,” Kanaya said a moment later, while Rose was still squeezing the tip of her finger to extract all the blood. “That wasn’t very funny.” 

‘Murder issues’ and ‘conscience.’ Kanaya hadn’t shown any compunction over her determination to make clown sashimi. Maybe the difference for her was that she wanted to kill, but Terezi had already done it. A culture of competitive slaughter. She rubbed her wrist, where Kanaya had bitten her two weeks previously, the two scars suddenly tight and protective over the veins. She had given herself over to the dark gods for a dangerous trip to the land of _lex talionis_ , but trolls had not only been occupying that place for years prior, they had gotten tired of that and moved onto the murder frontier. Onward, ho, young troll, into death! For there will be your manifest destiny. 

“I wish you’d stop going on those clown hunts,” Rose said. “They make me nervous.” 

“He’s dangerous. He may be in that air vent right at this moment, preparing to drop from the shaft and slaughter us all indiscriminately.” 

“How will this help you restore your race?” Kanaya shifted in her chair, crossing her legs at the ankle, then at the knee. “It won’t, will it?” Rose said. “The matriorb needs your focus and attention—I don’t think I need to remind you that opportunities are infrequent, and will require your full complement of mental and physical faculties if you want to take advantage of them.” She edged closer to Kanaya, so their knees were almost touching. After a moment’s hesitation, she put a hand on Kanaya’s knee, then her upper arm, finally settling at her shoulder. The flesh was cold and stark under her fingers, but she squeezed anyway—surprised, a little, that it yielded. 

Kanaya’s eyelashes fell, obscuring the bright yellow of her eyes. “It will make me feel better,” she said helplessly, not making eye contact with Rose. She clenched her hand around her tube of lipstick, thumbnail working at a stubborn fleck of dried purple blood. “That’s important to me, too. I thought you'd know that.” 

I know a lot of things, Rose could have said, in varying tones. She knew psychology, or at least a serviceable version of it. She knew about Vriska, or at least a part of her. She knew of hundreds of different ways this trip could go; but instead she said, “Do you want to help me with this?” and held up Eustace and needle. 

Kanaya took the needle between her fingers, and in her hand, it gleamed like a tiny shard of star. She had probably held needles hundreds of times before, probing the eye with a slim line of thread until it went through. She had probably gone through all kinds of phases: troll goth, troll twenties, troll vintage. Rose watched Kanaya work at Eustace, every stitch narrow, small, and perfect. Her hand lit one half of Eustace, then the other as she worked, until finally she reached the end of him. She snipped the thread with the scissors, and then smiled at herself, pleased. 

“Have you ever outgrown something?” Rose asked, to distract herself from the sense that she was tumbling slowly into a hell made out of needles, hands, and flashing dragon faces. 

“No,” Kanaya said. “Unless you count being alive, and having an actual functioning spinal cord.” 

“Can you call it ‘outgrowing’ if you’re technically undead? Maybe it’s ‘outdecaying’ now? I’m only poking fun. Don’t scowl.” 

“I’m not.” Kanaya smoothed her hair back into place, and picked up a blue scalemate, one with orange eyes. “Why do you ask?” 

“I just wanted to know,” Rose said. Not mentioning, of course, what had happened earlier when Kanaya had been roaming the halls like a hunted animal, all weapons on display. Not mentioning how Terezi had shied away from her only momentarily before whipping back around with a confrontational quip, or how she had bullied Rose into helping her recycle all those objects around her into grist, as though to prove to her that she could do it—or as though by doing it in front of an audience, the reduced objects would mean less to her.

***

When she woke up again, the meteor was rocking back and forth, and her pile of scalemates was falling away beneath her butt. Rose’s limbs kicked out instinctively—her feet knocked away more scalemates, and the resulting slip sent more scalemates flying away from her, and she hit the ground elbow first. “Ow!” she said. No one said anything back. She blinked up at the ceiling, and saw the pinkish haze of the Alternian sky instead. 

Rose pulled herself up. She was on a bluff overlooking a castle. Several castles, rising black and spindly on the cliffs; but from here she had a near perfect view of a Gothic structure with twelve-paned windows and pig-faced gargoyles with machine guns placed in their maws the way one might garnish a whole hog with an apple in the mouth. Terezi was a short while from her, leaning heavy on her cane. When Terezi turned to look at Rose, her face for a moment remained drawn inward; but then she grinned, the same as always. 

“About time you got up,” she said. 

“How long have we been here?” Rose said. There was a dragon jammed in her lower back. She pushed herself off the pile, and made a note to improve the structural stability of the base. 

“Not long. Guess I was the only one up when we ran into the bubble.” Terezi peered down at the cliff, then turned her head so she was looking behind Rose. Rose turned, and saw, small and slim, a younger Terezi in the red and teal costume tearing apart a flower and casting the petals down to the gap below. “I bet you have all kinds of questions!” Terezi said. “This is a pretty sweet memory, too. Fire away.” 

“Actually, I don’t.” 

“Seer powers?”

“Tempered curiosity.”

“You don’t need to,” Terezi said. “Your questions are a pain in the ass, but they’re only natural for a Seer.” 

“I know,” Rose said, but it didn’t relieve her at all. Terezi reached over and patted Rose’s shoulder awkwardly, as though she was a giant learning how to touch people gently. 

“Look!” Terezi said. “That’s me on a FLARPing mission. I got Aradia to be my clouder. I’m going to rob the schmuck living there and cut off a piece of his lusus to sell on the black market.” They watched her dream self take cover behind a cluster of trees. “I’m tired of missing Vriska,” she said. “I’m tired of wishing I hadn’t killed her. But I’m also sick of pretending I don’t care.” 

“You don’t have to pretend around me,” Rose said. “I mean it.” 

The dream Terezi, after she shredded the whole flower—a tricky task, considering that most Alternian plant life either had teeth or poisons—wiped her hands on her knees and unsheathed her sword from the cane. She spoke into her headset, then laughed—feckless and young, and not yet disappointed by anyone. The current Terezi blinked at her past self; the blankness of her eyes sometimes conferred on her a look of bright menace, but now it only reminded Rose of the dreamselves, with their eyes burning with ghost light. She said, “Thank you, Rose,” with a grace Rose hadn’t expected. Then she grabbed Rose by the nose and yanked her forward, so they standing shoulder to shoulder. “Just testing it,” she said while Rose held onto her face and puffed through the mouth to relieve herself of the pain. She went to the scalemate pile, poked it with her cane, and then flopped over in it. Her cane rested across her lap, an innocuous white and red slash across the black of her jeans. Her hand, by miracle, found Polonius. She cuddled him, fitting his head along the curve of her throat and jaw. 

“Do you want one?” Rose said, rubbing her nose to get rid of the sting. 

Terezi stroked the line of stitches on the scalemate’s belly, and dug her nail under a stitch—then, deciding otherwise, let her hand curve around its stomach, and did it no harm. Seated on the scalemate pile and hugging a bright red scalemate herself, Terezi looked the very picture of an evil overlord, or maybe a child set loose in a toy store. “They’re yours now, Rose,” she said. “I don’t want them anymore. I’ve moved onto bigger, badder dragons. Look over there. This is the part where dream me gets shot by the security system.” 

The dream Terezi had already been shot by the time Rose located her. She was climbing a tree, scrambling up its branches and leaving a teal smear on the bark as she crawled up. Rose said, fascinated, “Are you sure you survived this one?” 

“As much as anyone survives anything,” she answered—which was the truest thing she could have said, all things considered.


End file.
